Maori Cyberterrorism Vs LEGO Leads To Reprisals

New Zealand website Aotearoalive.com has
been threatened with hacker attacks from a group calling
itself the Army of Free Speech following a denial of service
hacker attack earlier this week on a LEGO fan website by an anonymous “Maori Cyberterrorist”.
Stranger than fiction. You bet. But this is for real!

The
following is the message received by Aotearoalive.com
today.

“To whom it may concern:

In response
to the unlawful "terrorist" hacker attack on BZPOWER, we
have learned the Army of Free Speech is preparing a
retaliatory strike on the Maori site network. The A.F.S. has
researched of the Maori's extortion of Lego over the use of
"cultural language." Even though the Maori tribe has
benefited financially, members of the tribe continue to
attack... in this case "a community of children." This
attempt to "bind the use of language" is unacceptable on the
world wide net and will be punished accordingly by the the
army of free speech. If you have any power to stop the Maori
hack attacks, please do so... otherwise, prepare yourselves
for a cyber war that could be devastating. These people are
not joking.

Best regards,

Free Speech Worldwide
Inc

Te Rangikaiwhiria Kemara,
Adminstrator of Aotearoalive says that he woke up to this
yesterday to find his site under attack in retaliation to
the damage the alleged 'Maori cyber terrorist' did.

If
you read the posting (transcribed below) from the BZPower
site you will see that the hacker took the discussion forums
down using a denial of service attack. A denial of service
attack floods a website with garbage file requests until it
overloads the servers.

In their response to the attack
BZPower has connected the hacker attack with a series of
postings last year by Aotearoalive.com’s Catherine Karena.
And linked in the BZPower posting are excerpts from these
postings.

For the last several days, a self-proclaimed
Maori hacker has attacked BZPower’s forums with a form of a
Denial of Service hack. Despite the BZP staff's long hours
trying to counter the threat, our hosting provider has
pulled the plug on the forums until the cyberattacks
cease.

On Sunday, an anonymous post in the Completely
Off-Topic forum stated the hacker’s intention to attack the
site. The threat used a year-old grievance of some Maori
tribe members against the LEGO Company’s use of certain
Maori-derived words in the Bionicle line of products (see
links at bottom). The attack exploited a weakness in our
IkonBoard forum software, and although we were able to
lessen the impact, the unsophisticated yet persistent
attacks still caused the server to slow to a crawl. Requests
for assistance on IkonBoard’s support forums have not been
answered, and there is no documentation available about
thwarting such a brute force attack.

At its height, BZP
was pummeled by tens of thousands of garbage server requests
per hour.

The initial threat was posted Sunday
morning:

I am giving you 24 hours to pull
this board down and discontinue the abusive use of the Maori
culture, customs and history.

Once you have pulled the
board down you will then need to contact Leggo and announce
to them and the international press your remorse and desire
to begin an active campaign against the abuse of indigenous
cultures.

Failing that its open season...

Kotiate (thats
'koti' as in 'kokoti' and 'ate' as in 'ate')

ps:deleting
this post means we being immediately

The
thread was closed almost immediately, and the attacks
started an hour afterwards. Using information about the
hacker, we contacted their ISP (Verio) who hasn’t responded
since we first tried to contact them on Sunday. The hacker's
email provider may be able to provide information in
December. Until then there is apparently no way for BZP to
stop this Maori cyberterrorist from shutting the forums
down.

Of the two self-proclaimed Maori who have visited
BZP, this is the second overwhelmingly negative impression
they have imparted. Previously "Kataraina" joined and
provided several days worth of aggressive and contentious
posts (see side
article).

The current demand by the Maori hacker,
obviously unreasonable and insulting, will not and cannot be
met, since we deny any and all allegations of abuse. BZPower
has never abused or encouraged the abuse of the Maori
culture, or any culture or people, despite the opinions of
some few radicals. We continue to use the terminology
employed by the LEGO Company, including words like Toa, Mata
Nui, Pohatu, Whenua, and Tohunga. The BZP staff is fiercely
committed to returning the forums to functionality as soon
as possible. We also staunchly defend the right of any
person to speak their mind and defend their point of view,
which a Maori terrorist has taken away. BZPower will do
everything in its power to end the hacking attacks and
return our forums to service.

BZPower would like to ask
for the assistance of anyone within the Maori sphere of
influence, who would be able to help convince the radical
elements within the Maori people that such destructive
behavior is counterproductive to improving that culture’s
international acceptance. Such negative publicity is certain
to impede anything the Maori are trying to achieve, and
shutting down a forum about a toy will certainly do more
harm than good in the long run.

Alastair Thompson is the co-founder of Scoop. He is of Scottish and Irish extraction and from Wellington, New Zealand. Alastair has 24 years experience in the media, at the Dominion, National Business Review, North & South magazine, Straight Furrow newspaper and online since 1997. He is the winner of several journalism awards for business and investigative work.

Contact Alastair Thompson

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